US author and historian says allure of the taboo may explain why measures such as the 1994 assault weapon ban led to an explosion in popularity

When Martin KA Morgan was a kid in the 1970s, military-style rifles were only a “small sliver” of the firearms market in the United States.

More than twenty years later, Morgan said, American firearm ownership has been radically transformed. “Semi-automatic, magazine-fed rifles – they dominate the market,” he said.

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By 1994, the Clinton administration was close to passing a federal assault weapon ban… In the months before the 1994 crime bill, which included an assault weapon ban, passed, “there was a mad scramble among the shooting public”

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“I believe that we can assign Freudian psychology to it,” he said… Today, Morgan believes, the popularity of military-style guns “continues to be driven by the ban concept”.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that many of the worst villains in government are indeed dead set on stripping down the 2nd Amendment until is has no real meaning.

The attempts at gun control are sincere, in a sense, but they are also quite frightening – perhaps intentionally.

On Wall Street and in the realm of economic crashes, there is money to be made on the way up, and on the way down. The manipulation of all phases of a bubble is key to those who would make a fortune off of the misery of others; it is the essential Machiavellian stroke.

Here, with firearms like the AR-15, a huge money making opportunity has developed around the mad dash to stock up on guns and ammo before and in case of new legislation banning “assault weapons” or anything else.

Perhaps it should come as no real surprise that many of the biggest gun control liberals on Capitol Hill secretly have stocks in gun manufacturers and ammunition supplies, as well as the raw materials.

Many of them hide behind the fact that funds they invest in have such diverse holdings that a bit of firearms-funding is all-but unavoidable.

The Washington Post estimated last year that Barack Obama had given the gun industry at least a $9bn billion boost, in part because of his high-profile advocacy for gun control in the wake of a series of mass shootings in 2012. Gun sales have spiked since the very beginning of Obama’s presidency, with record-breaking sales in recent months, and the trend seems likely to continue if Hillary Clinton occupies the White House.